Problem

How do I say VOT in Spanish?

• Technical fields with specialized terminology need translations

• Many fields don’t have satisfactory translations into many langauges

• Most academics aren’t translators

Proposal

• We can learn from anime
• Fansubs are…
• Arose out of necessity

Purpose

• Translate linguistic terminology in Romance languages

• Provide community forum for consulting/suggesting/discussing translation

• Made by end-user for end-user (i.e. linguists)

Current practices

• Reverse wikipedia + google search
• Find articles/books
• Ask a prof/advisor/lab buddy
• Wing it

Problems with current practices

• Wikipedia only has entries in russian
• No pertinant articles/books in TL
• (linguistic) God complex
  • reliance on specific translation because it’s what somebody else said first (Chomsky, Bosque, etc.)
  • doesn’t take into account that it might not be a good translation
• Prof/advisor/lab buddy doesn’t know/care

What we need

• Forum where end-users (linguists) discuss, propose and rate translations of linguistic terminology

Possible consequences:

• Eliminates God complex?
• Creates a database that formed by linguists that can be accessed by linguists (students, profs)

KISS

• Minimalist design
• Intuitive
• Accesible from mobile devices

How it works

• User submissions
• Staging
• Revision
• Inclusion

Searching

• Query sent to database through PHP
• Database searched for ‘x’ term
• Result sent back to webpage through PHP

Submission process

• Required info collected for each submission
  • SL entry
  • TL entry
  • meaning
  • example usage
  • references
  • tags

Functionality

• Rating system
  • ‘thumbs up’/‘thumbs down’
  • Display % ‘thumbs up’ with each entry
  • Rating occurs in entry, but accessible from forum
• Include multiple possibilities/translations for each entry (if suggested by users)
  • Ex.
    • English: ‘voice-onset time’
    • Spanish: ‘tiempo de inicio de sonoridad’/‘tiempo de inicio de fonación’
  • Entries listed vertically, in order of highest rating
• Entry count in ‘about’ section
• Google form to submit entries (same excel as staging)
  • Submissions come from:
    • forum
    • search results (if it’s not there, they can add it)
• Definitions
  • Include English definition with each entry

Short term

• Functional dictionary with limited entries
• Build forum
• Promote to linguists
  • facebook
  • twitter

Long term

• Become principle reference for linguistic terminology in Romance
• Grow user base
• Serve as model for language revitalization projects
  • open source code (github)
  • article (Comanche)

References

• lots
• and lots

NOTES - the community establishes authority (Kiraly 2003)